This is a stunning set. Just finished catching the documentary on the making of the film and reconstruction where many a story on Fuller and his working methods is told by the cast. But wait to you catch his daughter! Dressed in army gear, chomping on a fat cigar, she growls and spits about her father and the work with rightful pride. The great man himself would be pleased.

I heard last night the ever hopeless Warners Australia are pulling this disc from the shelves having inadvertently sent it out prior to a scheduled theatrical run through Reading cinemas in Sydney (and possibly Melbourne.) There are still copies ($25) at JB Parramatta (here we go again - thanks Zarah!) but city stores are now denuded.

Watched the R1 disc last night. There is one MASSIVE dissapointment. It appears that the deleated scenes and alternate takes on disc two are presented only with commentary, so you can't hear the dialogue. This was clearly a mistake. I hope they recall this or remedy it somehow. For years people have been waiting for this, WB uncovers the material, they transfer it to DVD, and then two ass holes talk over all the dialogue. WTF!

Last edited by BWilson on Thu May 05, 2005 12:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I must say I appreciate the heads up. I had it in my hand and for whatever reason I decided not to purchase it. Now that I've read this I am pleased to have saved $20 that can be given to Criterion instead...

I would still recommend buying this. The extra forty minutes flush out the stroy much more and the two docs are great. Oh well, the commentary on deleted scenes can't be turned off, but if these scenes were crucial to the film I imagine they would've been included in the shooting script and the reconstruction. A minor flaw.

I would still recommend buying this. The extra forty minutes flush out the stroy much more and the two docs are great. Oh well, the commentary on deleted scenes can't be turned off, but if these scenes were crucial to the film I imagine they would've been included in the shooting script and the reconstruction. A minor flaw.

Well if you don't care about it that's fine, but I've been waiting a long time to see the "grandmother under the tank" scene and they fucked it up. If you're fine with it that's great, but that doesn't make it OK. For those of us who do care, this is a big deal. I'd back you up if it were a title you cared about.

Guys, these deleted scenes have no audio. When they found the footage used to restore the film, they found a bunch of material where no audio tracks could be found to accompany it. I don't know if they explain this on the disc or in the commentary, but this was explained when the film was initially restored. If you want to see it without the commentary, you can just turn the sound off, but that's as good as it's ever going to get. That audio is lost forever.

I know I'm a bit late to this discussion, but I was pretty unhappy about the way Warner handled disc 2 as well. Most of those "Alternate Scenes" do indeed possess some, if not all, their original audio. As Narshty, points out, the grandmother scene does. You can tell there's partial audio (but only partial) for the alternate German infiltrator scene during the Bulge. And some of the short clips they left out (where the insane guy talks directly into the camera, the first conversation about the palm trees, etc.) have all their audio. I feel like this is just a screw-up on Warners' part, and they really ought to think about replacement discs. It's one of the few times I've been sorry I've bought a Warner disc.

Sorry, my mistake. Shickel said he was going to place the remaining bits that were still missing their audio tracks as seperate special features, but I guess something far different is going on. Scary.

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I just watched this bonus disc and was flabbergasted that there was only forced commentary on the deleted scenes and "anatomy of a scene" features. Totally ridiculous.

The scene audio is not missing. It is clearly there. You can hear it in the extremely brief sections when the two commentators are not talking and you can clearly discern scene audio underneath all the commentating. They had even taken the time to ADR Lee Marvin's missing lines with a voiceover actor in one of these scenes, and you can hear that under the commentators' voices. These were scenes that they worked on and would have added to the reconstructed cut, but just could not find a way to fit in.

I'm surprised more discussion was not had here, as this is a very significant DVD release and a very interesting experiment in reconstructing a film. I'm also surprised to come here and see the thread ending here with no resolution to the problem. (I just rented the DVD from Netflix, so at least I didn't pay for this faulty disc. But I expect I got a fairly recent copy.) So no one's been able to bang on Warner's door or contact Shickel and get this resolved?!? I expect more from this rabble-rousing forum!!

I agree it's a very big mistake, that has bugged me for a long time. If this happened on the DVD for Bad Boys 2 there would be enough user complaints to get a recall, but not for this title which is comparatively obscure.